Privacy Policy

Paperlight – Scan, Look Up & Keep What You Read
Last updated: October 2, 2026

  Summary: Paperlight keeps your books, scanned pages, quotes and notes on your iPhone or iPad and nowhere else. There is no account, no server of ours, no analytics and no tracking. The App only reaches the internet when you ask it to: to look something up on Google, to find a book cover, to share a card, or to let Apple handle a Pro purchase. We never see your reading, your name or your payment details.

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy describes how Paperlight (the "App") handles information when you use it. Paperlight lets you scan a page of a printed book, select a word or line to look it up, and keep a chart for every book you read, with your bookmarked pages, quotes and what you learned. By using the App, you agree to the practices described below.

2. What Stays On Your Device

Everything you create is saved in the App's private storage on your device. This is the complete list:

Stored on your device	What it is for
Your books	Title, author, start and finish dates, what you learned, and the cover you chose
Page bookmarks	The page number, your note, and the photo of the page if you scanned it
Quotes	The lines you saved, with page number and note
Lookups	The words and passages you looked up, so you can find them again
Your first name	Optional. Used only to greet you on the home screen
App settings	Whether you've seen the intro and the tour, and how many free scans you've used today
Pro status	A cached yes/no from Apple, so Pro works offline

None of this is sent to us. It is included in your device's own backups (iCloud Backup or a computer backup) the same way other app data is, under your Apple Account and Apple's protections. Deleting the App removes all of it from your device.

3. Scanning Pages

When you scan a page with the camera or pick a photo of a page from your library, the text is recognised on your device using Google's ML Kit text recognition. The photo and its text are not uploaded anywhere. If you bookmark the page, its photo is kept in the App's private storage; otherwise it is discarded.

ML Kit is a Google software library built into the App. Google states that it may send Google basic, non-identifying diagnostic information, such as the device model, iOS version, app version and how quickly recognition ran, to keep the library working. It never includes your photos or the text on them. See Google's ML Kit terms.

4. When the App Uses the Internet

The App only connects to these services, and only when you take the action described:

Looking something up

When you tap Meaning, Explain or Google, the App opens a Google search for the text you selected in an in-app Safari window. For Explain, the search also includes the book's title and author so Google can find discussions of that exact passage. That search goes to Google directly and is covered by Google's privacy policy, just as if you had searched in Safari.

Finding a book cover

When you search for a cover online, the App sends the book's title and author to Open Library and the Google Books API to find matching covers, and downloads the one you choose. Nothing else is sent. You can always take a photo of the cover or pick one from your library instead, which stays on your device.

Sharing

Share cards are created on your device. They only leave it when you choose to send them to WhatsApp or save them to Photos (if WhatsApp isn't installed, the iOS share sheet opens instead). From there, that app's own privacy policy applies.

Purchases

See section 6.

5. Information We Do Not Collect

There are no user accounts. No sign-up, no login, no email collection.
The App never sends your books, quotes, notes, scanned pages or name to us. There is no Paperlight server to send them to.
There is no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting SDK, no advertising and no tracking of any kind, within the App or across other apps and websites.
The App does not access your contacts, calendar, location or microphone.
We do not sell or share personal information, because the App never has any.

6. Purchases

Paperlight Pro is available as an auto-renewing monthly or yearly subscription, sold through Apple's In-App Purchase system. Apple handles the entire transaction. We never see and never receive your payment details, your Apple Account, or your name.

To show prices in your currency and to know whether Pro is active, the App asks Apple's App Store directly on your device. Nothing is sent to us.

Apple provides developers with aggregated, anonymised sales and download reports. Those contain totals, not individuals, and cannot be traced back to you. Your purchase is governed by Apple's own terms and privacy policy.

7. Read Aloud

Read aloud uses the voices built into iOS. Speech is generated on your device and your quotes are not sent anywhere.

8. Diagnostics Sent To Apple

If you have turned on Share With App Developers in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, Apple may include Paperlight in the anonymised crash and performance reports it shares with developers. This is an Apple feature, it is off unless you enable it, and those reports never contain your books, quotes or anything that identifies you.

9. iOS Permissions

Camera: to scan book pages and to photograph a book's cover. Without it you can still pick photos from your library or add quotes and bookmarks by hand.
Photos: to pick a photo of a page or a cover, and to save share cards to your Photos. The App only sees the photos you choose and only adds the cards you save.

You can change these at any time in iOS Settings → Paperlight. The App requests no other permissions.

10. Children's Privacy

Paperlight collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13 or the equivalent minimum age in your country.

11. Data Security

Because the App does not transmit or sync your reading, its security depends on the security of your device: your passcode, Face ID or Touch ID, and iOS itself, which encrypts app data by default.

12. Your Rights and Deleting Your Data

Data protection laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal data a company holds about you. We hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing for us to access, export or delete, and nothing to sell.

Your data is fully under your control on your device:

Delete a quote, a bookmarked page or a lookup individually.
Clear all lookups with Clear next to Recent lookups on the home screen.
Delete a book, with its chart, bookmarked pages and their photos, with Delete book at the bottom of the book's page. Its quotes stay in Quotes until you delete them.
Change your name with Show the intro again at the bottom of the home screen.
Uninstalling the App removes all of its data from your device.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be reflected by an updated "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If a future version of the App ever collected personal data, it would ask for your explicit consent first.

14. Contact

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or about how Paperlight handles your information, you can reach out:

Email: purvi@thepeakai.com
Support page: purvichopra.com/paperlight-support.html